News Brief

U. N. ISSUES REPORT ON SCORPION PASS AND NAHHALIN INCIDENTS

The United Nations released today the reports of Gen. Vagn Bennike, Chief of Staff of the truce supervision organization, on the Nahhalin incident and the bus massacre at Scorpion Pass.

As far as the report on the latter is concerned, it says that a UN observer reached Scorpion Pass on the day of the incident. He noted that two of the victims of the massacre had no shoes and the ring finger of one dead woman was cut off. The report describes the efforts to trace the attackers but says that the tracks were lost around Wadi Fukra.

An Israeli sergeant who survived the massacre described the ambush and said that in his opinion the attackers were gone in about ten minutes after the first shot was fired. They seemed to be in a hurry and one of them said constantly: “yalla, yalla” – which is “hurry up” in Arabic.

Gen. Bennike’s report gives the statement which the chairman of the Mixed Armistice Commission made in abstaining on the Israeli demand that Jordan be found guilty for this incident. The account of the Nahhalin incident does not include anything that has not already been revealed both in the Mixed Armistice Commission and in the Security Council.

(Israel Army Chief of Staff Maj. Gen. Moshe Dayan today wrote Gen. Bennike, UN truce chief, charging that Gen. Bennike and the truce organization had overreached its responsibilities under the Israel-Jordan armistice agreement and the functions assigned the truce machinery by the UN Security Council. He wrote in reply to a protest by Gen. Bennike that UN observers at the scene of the Mevoot Betar incident–in which three Israelis were killed by Jordanian troops but Israel was nevertheless blamed by the mixed armistice–had been mistreated and threatened by Israeli officials.)